Homelessness In Los Angeles Has Surged By 75 Percent In Six Years

Image Credit: Jay Skip

Original Article | Author: Mike LaChance

California has established itself as the state leader of the anti-Trump resistance. It has declared itself a sanctuary state and continually pushes for far left policies like single payer healthcare. Yet California’s own house is in disorder. Los Angeles has a homelessness crisis in its midst.

Gale Holland reports at the Los Angeles Times:

L.A.’s homelessness surged 75% in six years. Here’s why the crisis has been decades in the making

Some of the poorest people in the city spend their days in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall, napping on flattened cardboard boxes.

On any given day, as many as 20 people take to the City Hall lawn, across the street from LAPD headquarters. They’re there to “escape the madness” in downtown streets, a 53-year-old homeless man named Lazarus said last week. At night, they fan out to doorways or deserted plazas to wait for daybreak.

The growth of a homeless day camp at the halls of civic power speaks to the breadth of Los Angeles’ burgeoning homelessness problem.

The number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75% — to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000 — in the last six years. (Including Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own homeless counts, the total is nearly 58,000.)

Three out of four homeless people — 41,000 — live in cars, campers, tents and lean-tos, by far the biggest single group of unsheltered people in any U.S. city. If you took out Los Angeles, national homelessness would have dropped last year for the first time since the recession…

The problem has only gotten worse since Mayor Eric Garcetti took office in 2013 and a liberal Democratic supermajority emerged in 2016 on the county Board of Supervisors.

Tent cities stretch from the Antelope Valley desert to the Santa Monica coast, with stopovers in unlikely communities — even Bel-Air, where a homeless cooking fire was implicated in December’s Skirball fire.

To truly get a sense of how huge the problem is, take a look at the video below which was taken in August of last year. Two men on bicycles ride through a homeless tent city in Anaheim, outside Los Angeles. The video is six minutes long and the homeless camps just go on and on.

Credit: YouTube channel Jay Skip

Hat tip to Instapundit.

If you think any of this has caused California to re-think any of its policy positions, guess again. They’re planning to push even further to the left. Scott Wilson of the Washington Post:

Think California politics is on the far-left fringe? Just wait for the next elections.

For those who think California politics is on the far-left fringe of the national spectrum, stand by. The next election season, already well underway here, will showcase a younger generation of Democrats that is more liberal and personally invested in standing up to President Trump’s Washington than those leaving office.

Here in the self-labeled “state of resistance,” the political debate is being pushed further left without any sign of a Republican renaissance to serve as a check on spending and social policy ambitions. Even some Republicans are concerned about the departure of Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who proved to be fiscally cautious after inheriting a state seven years ago in deep recession.

The race to succeed him, as well as contests for U.S. Senate and statewide offices, probably will feature a November ballot exclusively filled with Democrats. The top two primary finishers compete in the state’s general election regardless of party, setting up several races between the Democrats’ left and even-more-left wings in the nation’s most-populous state, races that could signal the direction of the party’s future.

Perhaps California should fix its own problems before lecturing the rest of the country on things like immigration and spending.